XO avatars

[Hal Murray]

> We're going to have a "buddy picture" (which in XMPP is an "avatar")
> for each person that will be taken by the camera on first boot.  It
> will be changeable.  It'll be available from roll-overs on each XO
> icon wherever you see that icon in Sugar.

Sounds good.

But I'm picturing a screen with many XO icons and having to run the cursor 
all over the place to find a friend.  I think that would get annoying fast.

I like the suggestion of using South Park characters.  I think it generalizes 
to cartoon characters.  Kids would probably like animals too.  Or sports team 
logos.  ...

They could all be easy to tell apart, but now you have to learn the mapping 
from icon to person.  (and kids would probably make a game out of changing 
them frequently)

I think the key idea is that the icon picture should be distributed as a 
small wad of bits rather than an enumerated type.

I still think it would be interesting to try pictures as icons.  It should be 
simple enough to squish the buddy picture down to whatever size is used for 
icons.  I assume there is code to do that in the web browser.  Can I get at 
it from outside the browser?

Perhaps a magic key should pop up a text bar on each XO icon showing the 
name.  Perhaps the automagic layout should try to leave room so those text 
bars don't conflict with eachother.



-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.